THE REALARCADE GRAB-BAG: ROUND 1

This is the game that spurred my most recent RealArcade hunt, because something vaguely reminded me of it and I could not at all remember its kind of generic title. More accurately, I'd seen something that had reminded me of Super Granny, a franchise I actually DO remember well from my childhood, and something in the back of my mind was like "hey what was that other game with the grandma. the gardening one." I took my search to MobyGames, where I found nothing of use because this game is not listed there, but I did find a game for the Commodore 64 called Bionic Granny that puts you in the shoes of a wretched old lady Terminator terrorizing children, so it was worth the visit either way.

I pried into my mind to unearth the fact that this game had little helper buddies like the ones in Insaniquarium, and remembered Stinky the Snail functionally being lifted wholesale from that game and shamelessly plopped in here, so I looked at his page on its wiki and found that he was in fact reused in the Zen Garden in Plants vs. Zombies. This felt undoubtedly familiar to me, but it didn't match the gameplay loop or the visual style I remembered at all. Could it be that I was thinking of this and had simply severely misremembered it? Perhaps I did dabble in this, but no, no, I knew this couldn't be it.

The search continued, and this is when I turned to the RealArcade Preservation Project to see if they had what I was looking for. I notice in the notes for the most recent .rgs dump that one of the games listed is called "Garden Dreams", which doesn't particularly ring a bell but it also isn't any of the ones on MobyGames that didn't match my memory at all. I google "garden dreams realarcade" just to verify and find basically no documentation whatsoever, but there's something in the videos tab with footage of it and oh my god there it is. That's the one. The white whale.

Garden Dreams, gameplay-wise, is functionally Insaniquarium with plants. Instead of fish moving around that you have to keep fed, you have stationary crops to keep watered, but aside from that it's basically the same: keep your guys alive so you can collect drops from them that fall down to the bottom of the screen, which gives you money that you can use to buy upgrades and level progress. Instead of aliens inexplicably arriving to devour your fish, this game has a slightly more realistic swarm of pests to manage, and I say "slightly" because they do always arrive in one very big group with dedicated combat music like a calculated military attack squadron. I am able to put aside my bug-loving ways to get these godforsaken flies the hell out of here because they are EATING my WATERMELONS STOP THAT!!!!!.

I did misremember Stinky the Snail being here, but there is a tortoise that does the exact same thing and a skunk named Stinky and a snail among the pests with the exact same color scheme, so it's understandable that I would think this. It makes sense that bugs would be not ideal to have around in this environment, but it's still a little sad to see them so thoroughly villainized like always. At least one of your helpers is a spider. (His name is Sid.) I did not get to unlock him, but it seems like he is the same size as all these little vertebrate friends, so this nice old grandma can just have a foot-long spider prowling her garden like any serious gardener should.

Once I have gotten past the first set of levels and can move on from the beginner garden, I am treated to a delightful animation of Granny dancing the night away. I don't know how I forgot this part of the game, because it is the best part. Unfortunately, good things cannot last forever, and my time here is up a few levels later; I have a separate .rgs for this game that may well be the full version, but unfortunately it runs into an invalid script command when I try to install it. At least now I know what it's called if I ever think to look for it again on some other computer I might have in the future.

Supercow is a game I have only the vaguest memories of, because I never played the full version as a kid; I was limited to the demo as I am now, which didn't give it time to leave much of an impression. It is very, very similar to one of my very favorites from when I was small, good old Turtle Odyssey (and more specifically Turtle Odyssey 2, which I played way more of): A simple platformer with very basic movement, with 3D characters on top of a painted background and level completion stats tracking money collected, enemies defeated, and secrets found. Other than this, the only thing that stuck out as crystal-clear in my memory for some reason is that there is a toilet in one of the first levels that plays a flush sound when you walk in front of it. That's the level of comedy we're dealing with here.

The plot of this game is that there is an evil professor named Duriarti who has escaped prison and is now experimenting on the animals at a local farm, spurring Supercow into action. She seems to imply that she does not go about her every day as a superhero, but she is still wearing a cape and mask around in her daily life, because I guess that's just her thing. She has a diary where she records her thoughts between levels, which I largely did not read because the game includes real-time pauses between the sentences she writes. I'm on a time crunch here, Supercow.

Two major differences strike me as I play through the early levels, compared to Turtle Odyssey; one is that the characters are in fact fully 3D models rather than prerendered sprites of 3D models, and the other is that this game is fully-voiced. The voice actors are very British, which aligns with the dialect generally used in the game's other text, and honestly? Their performance actually isn't half bad. This also, however, makes it stand out how kind of wonky and stilted a lot of the other text's grammar is, because I was fully ready to attribute that to the devs not having English as their first language.

On the topic of this game's text, also, I should note that literally all of it is in Comic Sans. In eras past this would have been The Funniest Thing Ever, but it is still magical even now in 2023, if not the least because of the way this game's text formatting generally feels held together by tape and a few toothpicks. The font only serves to contribute to an air of ironic amateurism that is so pervasive it seems almost deliberate. The visual effect when you take damage is literally just the word "ouch" in all-lowercase popping up on top of you. There are several instances where a tutorial popup or one of Supercow's diary entries will just have a little :) emoticon written out. One of the trophy names had no text wrapping despite being very long so it just kept going straight off of the text box.

The voiced dialogue, on the other hand, is generally written fine, or at least it feels less noticeable because I am hearing actual people say these lines. These scenes are presented in the form of Supercow's 3D model doing her idle animation in front of a static, drawn portrait of a character. The first person she encounters is a sheep named Molly, who tells her how Prof. Duriarti tricked all of the animals by giving them sugar that somehow had laxatives baked into the individual grains (?????) (HUMOR™). From here she talks to Jim Donkey, who is a bit of a well-meaning dumbass (get it) whose voice direction makes him read as ambigiously gay, and Kevin the Goose, who is the resident self-centered genius and carries an aristocratic aura. I did not get to meet anyone else past these three.

Through her conversations with the other animals, Supercow learns that the goat and the pig have betrayed the farm to work with the professor. The game very consistently calls them "THE goat" and "THE pig", implying they are the only ones that exist on this farm, and Supercow says she has known them for more than 100 years, which raises so many wild lore questions. Is there only one of each animal on this farm, and all of them are ageless representations of the very concept of their species? Why is there a regular unlimited amount of the wild animals that are your enemies? Why is the only cow's gimmick that she is also a superhero? What furry designed that weirdly beefcakey biker guy goat? Unfortunately, I will not get to learn the answer to any of these questions, because before I can get much further my time is up. (Sure I could just get this one on Steam, but I like the mystique.)

I downloaded this in my fruitless search for another game I've been hunting for, left unable to find any trace of its existence as I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called. All I can remember is that it had a magical fantasy theme, it was a business management sim, and that I have vague recollections of a money loaning mechanic with a literal loan shark character.

This is not that game. This is a game about a fairy named Delfbert, who looks like a dweeby Jimmy Neutron extra. I have never played this before.

This game's story is presented through the format of small comics, wherein dialogue bubbles are placed over posed images of 3D models. Our tale opens with Delfbert being awoken from his tutorialful slumber by his friends telling him the fairy chief wants to see him. Delf's friends are a deeply generic guy with the similarly dumb name of Wilf, and The Girl One, whose name I think was just Angelica but it never actually came up in the story dialogue. The chief sends these three out on a quest to fix things because, and I quote, "a powerful and evil monster has entered our forest and started doing really bad things everywhere". (This game's writing is extremely tongue-in-cheek about how much it is an excuse plot for a puzzle game, and honestly it is pretty funny sometimes, from what little I got to see of it.)

The actual meat of the gameplay is, like basically every one of these things known to man, a color-matching game. Unlike the vast majority of those games, however, it is not a match-three; instead, blocks on the perimeter of the grid have colored sigils that are revealed as you clear things away, and you have to select two block groups that have the same sigil to remove both of them. While this is fairly unique, it's not particularly hard, because it is incredibly easy to rack up massive points by just "digging" inward near the top of the screen until most of the on-screen board is hanging from a single block. Our little grid is affected by gravity, and your point combo is based off of how many blocks you clear at once, so if you play semi-competently you end up with gold combos constantly. Maybe this gets harder later! I wouldn't know! But I never even got close to the halfway point on the level timer.

While you play, there are powerup blocks for each character that you can match for big effects, and they just have the character's face printed on them. Delfbert's looks generally as fine as his model can look, which serves only to draw attention to the lives icons on the side of the screen, whose expression is more... uncomfortable. What the hell is is that supposed to be. I thought for a while that it was simply a particularly unflattering image cut out of one of the cutscene comics, but it doesn't match so as far as I can tell this icon is just uniquely awful. The, again, uncanny resemblance to the Jimmy Neutron artstyle really does not help at all here. I don't like thinking about it, but I refuse to suffer this alone.

Every five levels you are then faced with the easiest bonus game ever invented. This is a memory game on a four-by-five grid, wherein the game shows you the locations of some fairies. You have unlimited time to study them, and when you're ready, you click to hide the fairies. You're probably expecting the squares on the grid to shuffle around, putting your memory skills to the test as you deduce the new pattern the fairies will have moved into, but instead of that exactly zero things happen and your challenge is just to click the squares where the fairies were. Did I mention you have unlimited time to study them? You have unlimited time to study them.

Our intrepid heroes make their way through world 1 and meet the wise tree they were sent to go talk to, who is actually completely useless and just makes surface-level observations, and so they just decide to leave and find somewhere else to go. This is the last I saw of this game's story, because the game decided to close partway through world 2. I was fully ready to commit to going through this entire thing and writing this up for the central games article instead, because "not marked as a demo and not in the demo folder" is not a sufficient tell whether a game will be affected by the demo limit, but it was sadly not meant to be.